The New Nature: Winners and Losers in Wild Australia

The Australian philosopher John Passmore once distinguished two important senses of the vexing term "nature": an inclusive sense, in which humans are a part of nature, and an exclusive sense, in which nature bears no mark of human hands. From the exclusive view, nature is where we are not.

This question of how we should conceive of nature is at the heart of Tim Low's book The New Nature. Low is an advocate of the inclusive view - although he does not identify himself as such - and argues that much of what we call nature is a human product, but remains intrinsically valuable, nevertheless.

In this book, as in his earlier, best-selling, work Feral Future, we can discern a desire for the wild to be valued as it is today, with all of its exotic additions, rather than through the prism of a human-exclusive ideal of wilderness.

What, exactly, is the "new nature"? For Low, the phrase refers to a conception of "natural" according to which nature is found in humanised environments. Low explains - in remarkable detail, and against what one might take to be prevailing environmental wisdom - that rare native animals do well in environments filled with exotic flora; wildlife gardening does more harm than good; maintaining pre-1788 ecosystems requires human intervention; some native animals destroy the environment; conservation sometimes requires the killing of native fauna; and wilderness is a dangerous myth.

He is particularly savage on the notion of wilderness because, as a number of writers have pointed out, the notion ignores the Aborigines' influence, before European settlement, on the landscape and the exotics' invasions of nearly all wild areas. From an inclusive view of nature, our wild areas might be more humanised than many think, but they are still worthy of moral consideration.

This emphasis on the inclusive view - and Low's desire to feel at one with nature while living in the suburbs - gives the book a rather Panglossian feel at times. This is especially true in the early chapters. It almost seems to be a case of whatever humans do, nature will adapt: the Sydney sewage outfall has good outcomes for rare seabirds, pinus radiata plantations are the homes of important rare species, and human structuring of land promotes biological diversity.

But this optimism gives way to a more sombre tone and, by the end, we are in more familiar territory, where human behaviour threatens pre-1788 ecosystems. His final view, then, looks rather like the Old Nature, but with the caveats that wild systems require management and that largely humanised environments (such as farms and buildings) can have high conservation values.

Low raises thorny philosophical issues regarding the goals of nature conservation, but doesn't always succeed in answering them. In the final chapter, he attempts to formulate what the proper goals of conservation might be.

After various suggestions, he settles (albeit hesitantly) on the unsatisfactory slogan "Let Being Be", a sentiment that sits oddly in the work of an author who spends a great deal of time defending the killing of certain native animals to preserve endangered flora and fauna.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one walks away from the book feeling confused. Some of this is a product of Low's tendency to overstate. (It is tempting to play the part of heretic here).

But, to be fair, Low cannot be blamed for all the confusion. Much of it is a consequence of tensions among conservationists about our relationship to humanised environments.

My view is that we would do better if, in rejecting the wilderness ideal, we avoided over-reaction. Instead of eschewing the idea that the human-exclusive is valuable, we should evaluate landscapes in terms of the extent to which they are humanised, with special consideration for those less touched by the human hand.

The themes explored in Low's book are important for conservationists. Although his solution to the "riddle of nature" is not entirely successful, he makes a strong case, through presenting many ecological cases studies, for the need for a new understanding of the natural. And he does so in a popular style that is accessible to the non-scientist. For this, Low is to be congratulated.

Adrian Walsh is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of New England, Armidale.